Workflow Is The New Work, And It Needs Unified Communications

Communications used to be a thing. Now, in 2017, communications is a platform. So much is this so that we find firms specializing in the so-called 'Unified Communications' space. Pushing this concept to service-based cloud computing delivery we logically get to Unified Communications -as-a-Service (or UCaaS, if you can stomach one more acronym).

What makes communications unified?

But what makes communication unified... and anyway, what was wrong with phone calls, emails and meetings?

The crucial thing to remember is that IT vendors are attempting to push us to a 'single platform' in every aspect of business, especially content and communications. We've heard the argument before, if an enterprise has one single financial or ERP or CRM system, then why shouldn't it use a single technology platform to look after communications?

Workflow is the new work

The industry has attempted to validate this argument further by insisting that there is now this thing called 'workflow'. Where we once had plain old work, we now have this higher level description of a task that is also defined by:

the content and data associated with it,

the steps it takes to get from definition to execution,

the information and documents that relate to it,

the team members dedicated to the task,

the procedural rules governing the task process in the first place.

To be clear, Workflow is the definition, execution and automation of business processes where tasks, information or documents are passed from one participant to another for action, according to a set of procedural rules. When we can take all these elements together and start to engineer them as one complete thing, then we can use Unified Communications to help connect and drive the process.